A NEW CROWN
Despite the return of Game of Thrones on HBO, Netflix leads Emmy race,
There is a raging, evolutionary battle playing out at this year’s Emmy Awards.
It is between traditional legacy broadcasters and upstart digital streaming services. And this Darwinian struggle has reached a tipping point.
For the first time in 17 years, HBO is not leading the pack. That honour goes to Netflix, with a record 112 nominations, compared to HBO’s 108.
It’s a scenario also playing out in film, as a Netflix movie, Out
law King, opened the Toronto International Film Festival this month over the protests of purists, and another Netflix entry, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, created some of the biggest buzz.
As theatre owners increasingly rely on the next Marvel spinoff to sell vibrating seats, 3D glasses and popcorn, there are fewer outlets for arthouse cinema. Television has become a natural home for independent filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh and Cary Fukunaga, and the small screen is exploding with major A-list talent, such as Julia Roberts starring in her first television series for Amazon this year.
Astonishingly, and as testimony to the speed of the technological disruption, Netflix really only became a player five years ago, in 2013, when its political thriller House of Cards was the first online show to be nominated for the prestige best drama category.
It put legacy networks such as ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC, with all their NCIS and Law & Order franchises, to shame.
To be fair, they had already ceded ground to the cable outlets, in particular HBO, in the quality game.
But it stings. Netflix was the wannabe company that used to send you DVDs in the mail, not make quality television with actual movie stars.
Yet it wasn’t Netflix, but another online streamer, Hulu, also known as that place Americans tuned in to get Seinfeld reruns, that blew the doors wide open.
At last years Emmy Awards, Hulu won the best drama prize for its first original quality programming, the Toronto-shot
The Handmaid’s Tale, a historic first.
This has not come without astronomical cost. The Economist projects that Netflix alone will spend as much as $13 billion (U.S.) this year, up from an original forecast of $8 billion.
In 2017, Netflix spent $6 bil- lion on content, dwarfing the $4 billion at CBS and the $2.5 billion spent at HBO.
With those deep pockets it has created a massive series of defections from the networks, with top showrunners such as Shonda Rhimes ( Grey’s Anato
my, Scandal) coming on board, and everyone from David Letterman to Barack Obama signing a production deal.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has run the company like a tech startup, not a traditional broadcaster, and he is disrupting the industry on a massive scale.
Like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, he is intent on gaining market share, spending mind-boggling amounts of cash at the expense of immediate profitability. That drives bottom-line-driven broadcasters crazy.
Astoundingly, financial investment site Motley Fool estimates that for each of the Emmy nominations earned by Netflix this year, it cost the company a minimum of $50 million.
That compares to about $23 million for HBO per nomination. No legacy broadcast executive, whose fortune depends on advertising revenue, unlike Netflix’s subscription model, would be able to hold their job with that kind of outlay.
“I can’t produce a show I want to make in the way I want to make it” without Netflix,
Anne with an E showrunner Moira Walley-Beckett told me earlier this year.
While the show is a co-production with the CBC, the bulk of the funding comes from Netflix, she says. The reality is, the CBC did not have the funds to produce the quality the show demanded without forming that crucial partnership, as it increasingly becomes a streaming world.
So on Monday night, Netflix and Hulu will once again face off for the top drama category with Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Netflix’s The Crown and Stranger Things.
HBO’s Game of Thrones and Westworld and FX’s The Americans are holding the fort for cable television, while NBC represents the lone legacy broadcaster with This Is Us.
But really, it boils down to a battle between a conventional cable broadcaster and an online usurper: it’s Game of Thrones vs. The Handmaid’s Tale.
This is the first time that Handmaid’s will face off against epic fantasy series GOT in the undisputed heavyweight bout. GOT returns after being absent for a year f rom Emmy eligibility, with Handmaid’s, based on the dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, taking the crown last year.
The tale of the tape has GOT with a slight lead at 22 nominations to 20 for The Handmaid’s Tale. GOT is already the most decorated series at the Emmys, including two for best drama to one for the first season of Handmaid’s.
Emmy voters like familiarity, which suggests that the top prize should go to Game of Thrones. But The Handmaid’s Tale is resonating in the Trump era where women’s rights are under siege and Roe v. Wade is a call to arms. So it’s a tough call.
Canadians have skin in the game with The Handmaid’s Tale, based on a beloved Canadian author’s work and shot locally in Toronto and Hamilton.
And Canadians will also be cheering on Tatiana Maslany who already has one Emmy for her work on clone thriller Orphan Black, as well as Sandra Oh, the first Asian woman to be nominated in the best dramatic actress category for her work on BBC’s comic spy drama Killing Eve.
Oh, who was nominated five times for best supporting actress in a drama for Grey’s Anatomy — and came up empty each time — is a sentimental favourite. Meanwhile, this is Maslany’s last season.
Also look out for expat Canadian Samantha Bee, nominated for her TBS show Full Frontal, even after she called Ivanka Trump a “feckless” C word on her show. Bee apologized for the outburst, but it apparently didn’t hurt her popularity with Hollywood voters.
Whoever wins, online broadcasters have already changed the way we watch and appreciate television. It has given viewers a new platinum era of quality that has surpassed anything before it, with the promise of even greater riches to come.